I had nothing to say but felt compelled to show some outward sign of
my inward life, even if it is lately muted and contorted. But as it
happens, even quotation has its sincerity, or lack of. So I have this
here, instead.

'Out of the consciousness of their truth they both are suspicious of
truth in its more naive form of scientific knowledge. Not that they
doubt the methodical correctness of scientific insight. But Kierkegaard
is astonished at the learned professors: for the most part they live
their lives and die, imagining that things would continue this way; and
that, if it were granted to them to go on living, they would comprehend
more and more in a continued direct ascent. They do not experience the
maturity by virtue of which there comes a critical turning point, where,
from this point on, it is a matter of comprehending, increasingly, that
there is something missing that cannot be comprehended. Kierkegaard
believes this is the most terrible way to live: to enchant the whole
world through one's discoveries and cleverness, to explain all of
nature, yet not to understand oneself. Nietzsche is inexhaustible in
his devastating analysis of the types of scholars who lack the real
sense of what they do, who are not able to be themselves, and yet believe
they can grasp, with their ultimately vain knowledge, Being itself.

Because they both question the ability of all self-enclosed rationalities
to communicate truth as a whole, they become radical opponents of the
"system," i.e., that form which philosophy had assumed through the millennia
and which led to its last burst of glory in German idealism. For them,
"system" implies distraction from actuality, and hence lie and deception.
Kierkegaard understands that for God existence can be a system, but not
for an existing spirit; system and closedness correspond to each other, but
existence is exactly their opposite. The philosopher who builds a system
is like a human being who builds a palace but lives in the adjoining
shanty: this phantastical creature does not himself inhabit that which he
has thought up. Yet a man's thoughts must be the edifice in which he
lives; anything else would be perverse. The fundamental question of
philosophy, i.e., what it is itself and what is science, is posed anew
and relentlessly. Nietzsche wants to be better at doubting than Descartes;
in Hegel's foundering attempt to fit reason into the developmental
process, he sees a Gothic attempt at storming the heavens. For him the
will to create a system shows a lack of integrity.

Both express in the same way what they understand knowledge really to
be. For them it is nothing other than interpretation.

Interpretation, however, has no end. Existence, for Nietzsche, is
capable of an infinity of interpretations. For Kierkegaard, whatever has
happened or was done in the past is always open to fresh understanding:
as it is interpreted, it becomes a new actuality that has been hidden
until then. Therefore temporal life can never be quite comprehensible
to man; no man can penetrate absolutely his own consciousness.

Both use the simile of interpretation for knowledge of Being, moreover
in such a manner as if Being were deciphered in the interpretation of
interpretation. Nietzsche wants to strip the original text, homo
natura, of succeeding layers of writing and to read it in its
actuality. Kierkegaard assigned no significance to his writings other
than that they are to be renderings of the original texts of individual
human conditions of existence.

Connected with this fundamental thought is the fact that both Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche - these most open and candid of thinkers - show a seductive
penchant for concealment and the mask. For them, the mask is
necessarily tied to being true. Indirect communication becomes
the only way of communicating genuine truth; and indirect communication,
as expression, belongs to the indecisive nature of truth in temporal
existence, in which it must still be grasped in the process of becoming
out of the wellsprings of each Existenz.

In their thinking, both encounter that ground which, in man, would be
Being itself: Kierkegaard counters the philosophy that has asserted,
from Parmenides through Descartes to Hegel, that "Thinking is Being," with
the proposition: "As you believe, so you are," "Believing is Being."
Nietzsche sees the Will to Power. But faith as well as Will to Power are
mere signa, themselves not showing directly what is meant but
themselves capable of limitless interpretation.

For both, honesty is the decisive motivating factor. For both
of them it is the expression of the ultimate virtue to which they submit.
It remains for them the minimum measure of the unconditional that is still
possible within the confusion where all content becomes questionable.
But it also becomes the vertiginous demand of a truthfulness that brings
even itself into question, which is the opposite of that expedient brute
power that believes it possesses the truth clearly in barbaric certitude.

It is a valid question whether anything at all is being said in thinking
such as this. Indeed, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are conscious of the
fact that the comprehension of their thinking is not open to man merely
as thinker. Rather, it is a matter of who it is that understands.

They address the individual who must bring with him and must
bring forth out of himself what they can say only indirectly. Kierkegaard
believes in Lichtenberg's epigram which he cites: Such works are mirrors;
if a monkey peeks in, no apostle can peek out. Nietzsche considers
understanding him a distinction that has to be earned. He states that it
is impossible to teach the truth where the manner of thinking is base.
Each seeks the readership appropriate to him.'

'From this it is evident that, although two attributes are conceived as
really distinct - that is, one without the help of the other - we cannot
infer from this that they constitute two entities, or, two different
substances. For it is of the nature of substance that each of its attributes
is conceived through itself, since all the attributes that it has were
always in it at the same time and one could not be produced by another,
but each one expresses the reality, or, the being of the substance. It
is therefore far from absurd to ascribe several attributes to one substance.
On the contrary, nothing in Nature is more clear than that each entity
must be conceived under some attribute, and that the more reality or
being it has, the more attributes it has which express both necessity
(or, eternity) and infinity. Consequently, nothing is clearer than that an
absolutely infinite being is necessarily to be defined (as we stated in
Def. 6) as an entity which consists of infinite attributes, each of which
expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence. But if anyone now asks by
what sign we can recognize the diversity of substances, let him read the
following propositions, which show that in the universe there exists only
a unique substance, and that this is absolutely infinite. So the sign in
question would be sought in vain.'

This Stylus
review is a nice piece of thematic criticism; I slightly enviously
wondered how they came up with the connection to Francis Bacon before
realizing the obvious (that it shows up in the onesheet or some such).
This of course does nothing to invalidate the work done in the review.